World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week
is the week that surrounds April 24th every year - It's
a national week of protests, media events, etc. at laboratories to stop testing
and research on animals

The Animal Experimentation Scandal:

An Audit of the National Institutes of Health
Funding of Animal Experimentation

Audit Findings

In general the trend appears to be towards an increase in animal
experimentation. The total of all of the National Institutes of Health-funded
projects involving the listed animals (macaca, saimiri, rat, mouse, dog, cat,
guinea pig, hamster& rabbit,) for fiscal 2001 is 29,441. This means that there
are literally tens of thousands of different animal experiments funded by the
NIH every year. The total for 1997 (a five-year span) is 24,891. The increase
from 1997 to 2001 is 4,550 new grants, or an increase of 18.3%. The 1992 total
is 21,448. Using this number we now have a ten-year span to examine. This shows
an increase of 7,993 projects or 37.3%. This trend does not involve dollars
spent or animals used. It examines only the actual number of grants awarded by
the NIH.

The numbers of projects involving dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and
hamsters have all decreased. The down side of this is that the experiments using
macaque monkeys, squirrel monkeys, chimpanzees, baboons, rats, and mice have all
increased, in some cases dramatically. Mouse projects have increased by almost
51% over the last five years, and by 127% since 1992. Chimpanzee experiments
have increased by 81.3% in the last ten years. Baboon protocols have increased
by 82% in the last ten years. Other species have seen slower increases over the
last ten years with macaque monkey experiments increasing by 50% and squirrel
monkey projects going up by a mere 36%.

We may be able to come up with a very general approximation of how much the
NIH spends on animal experiments every year. The NIH publishes average dollar
amounts per grant. For the year 2000, the average grant was $291,502. For 2000,
there were 29,855 projects listed from our searches. This gives us a potential
total of more than $8,7 billion. There are another 651 projects involving
species that were not mentioned above. However, for a final estimate we should
be conservative. The use of the CRISP system introduces a potential for
duplication in the searches discussed above (i.e. the same grant could use more
than one species and therefore show up in the totals multiple times). This can
be counteracted to some degree by the non-inclusion of the 651 projects listed
above. And, again, to be conservative, I would estimate that the NIH spends $8 –
$8.5 billion a year on animal experiments. This estimate is also on the
conservative side because it does not include a component for the indirect costs
associated with all NIH grants.

If specific institutions are examined in the same way, we can arrive at
estimates for the funding received for specific laboratories from the NIH for
the performance of animal experimentation. Many facilities receive well over
$100 million a year for the performance of animal experiments, with funding
amounts for some labs approaching $200 million (please see Appendix A for
funding estimates for specific facilities). Thirty facilities were examined for
NIH annual funding estimations; 56.7% of the facilities examined received over
$100 million a year from the NIH for performing animal experiments.

This finding of a significant increase in the number of grants funded by the
National Institutes of Health leads to several questions. Perhaps the most
important of these questions deals with the issue of duplication. Are all of
these research projects necessary? Are any of these grants redundant? Are those
researchers who are being trusted by the NIH to perform medical research
defrauding the American taxpayer?

While it is not within the scope of this audit to answer questions of this
nature, certain conclusions can be drawn from a relatively limited number of
additional searches that have been run using the CRISP system.

In order to deal with this potential for duplication within the NIH grant
system some basic searches were performed via the CRISP system. Three species
were used: rats, mice and macaque monkeys (chosen to illustrate both ends of the
evolutionary scale). The results of these searches were very disturbing. There
are currently (for fiscal 2001) 171 separate projects that examine neural
information processing in macaque monkeys. Since neural information processing
could still be a potentially large area, the topic was refined further.

Visual neural information processing in macaque monkeys brought up 123
separate projects within the CRISP system, 286 projects study cocaine in rats,
109 projects study cocaine in mice, and 55 projects study cocaine in macaque
monkeys. This is a total of 450 projects studying cocaine in three different
species (please see Appendices B – F for specific grant listings). If we use the
average grant amount posted by the NIH on their website ($291,502), this gives
us an estimated total of $131,175,900 annually spent on addiction research in
only three species of animals.

It must also be noted that some of these grants have been in existence for
decades. Specifically, several of the grants in the area of neural information
processing in macaque monkeys have been in existence for over 30 years, with one
reaching 38 years of age. This type of information spawns several further
questions. If this area has been studied by dozens of researchers for decades,
why are new grants continually appearing in this field? If decades of study have
not garnered worthwhile information, why are more grants being approved? If the
decades-old grants are not sufficient to examine the field, necessitating new
grants, why do the old grants continue to be renewed?

From a monetary point of view this kind of duplication is potentially
catastrophic. The hundreds of millions of dollars that the NIH spends every year
to fund medical research using animals may well be going into a bottomless pit
of duplication that accomplishes nothing other than funneling hundreds of
millions of tax dollars into the coffers of nationally known laboratories.

We may be told that this funding system is well supervised and that the
system does not allow for waste. However, animal based experimentation
potentially brings hundreds of millions of dollars into many U.S. laboratories
on an annual basis. In light of the fact that these institutions receive so much
federal funding, it is highly likely that duplicative experimentation is funded
on a regular basis. Many of the people that evaluate these projects are part of
the animal experimentation system themselves. We may be dealing with a good ol’
boys network where "I’ll approve your research if you’ll approve mine." There
may be far too little independent oversight, with far too many of the
individuals involved in the approval process having a vested interest in the
outcome of any decision regarding the validity of a project.

At the facility level, the membership of Institutional Animal Care & Use
Committees (which is responsible for institutional protocol approval) are
heavily weighted with people who either perform animal experiments or
individuals who otherwise have a vested interest (affiliated veterinarians) in
the performance of animal experimentation. Do they have any real motivation for
declining to approve a project? It appears that the only real motivation may be
to approve every project because each additional grant brings more money into
the laboratory.